Andrew Merrell

Currently a software engineer at Sky. Always Laughing.

In late 2013 airbnb bought our attention back to isomorphic javascript applications, whilst not the original inventors the post gave detailed explanation of how they achieved isomorphic javascript with nodejs. Given the year nodejs was still in production infancy. Therefore the topic of running the same app both server and client side produced interesting conversations.

Re-evaluating our software and framework choices on a regular basis allows us to be a dynamic and flexible player in the video streaming space. I’ve seen it far too often at Sky, we build large systems; traditional MVC monolith apps (we’re slowly moving away), thus we’re stuck with outdated technologies, due to the sheer amount of effort in migration to a new stack. Team productivity becomes restricted leading to stagnation and ultimately a loss of passion.

I’ve recently been watching The Blacklist on NOW TV and it stars the brilliant James Spader as Raymond ‘Red’ Reddington. The series is about an FBI agent Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone) who is tasked with looking after Red who is on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list.

Dockerizing our applications at NOW TV forced us to rethink application configuration, currently each RPM had every environment configuration bundled within, an environment variable is used to tell the application which configuration it should read.

Since using Angular from the very early days the framework has changed a lot and we’ve also built services and factories in multiple ways, looking back at them all I always ask myself is it the “Angular way”?

I’ve had a great opportunity since starting my graduate career with Sky, my 2 year rotational programme has let me experience different sides of the software development process as a tester, business analyst and where I’ve finally landed as a developer.

Server side logging; been doing it for years. However trends are changing, especially for our team, we are starting to offload logic from servers to the client using a javascript MVC and soon it will become a single page app. Our team will soon loose that valuable insight we get from server side logs.